I agree that Maddux should receive little credit for what he would have done in an imaginary 4-man rotation. I’d assign a slight amount of benefit to it just because it changes his value relative to his peers, but in general I agree that starting pitchers as a group are not as valuable as they used to be, which means Maddux is not as valuable as he would have been in the 60s. I certainly was not making an argument for that.
I think it’s important to note that Bill James never intended Win Shares to be a perfect metric for evaluating player value. If you went to him and said a guy with a 27-share season was definitely more valuable than a guy with a 25-share season he’d probably roll his eyes. That wasn’t the intent of his work.
Absolutely. The shorter the time span, the less reliable Win Shares are, and I agree that Bill says that 1 or even 2 WS over one season don’t mean clear superiority or inferiority.
Most of the time, tho, such differences over a season do reflect accurate assessments, and over a series of seasons, such as we’re discussing here, I don’t think there’s any question but that Bill is confident that WS are an accurate tool. Koufax’s 35 points in 1966 might not necessary elevate his value over Marichal’s 33, but they sure as hell tell us that he had a better year than Gibson, who had 26 that year. And they certainly tell us that from 1963-66 Koufax (with 124 WS) outpitched Marichal who had 114 during those four seasons. So they’re accurate over any real span of time, just not definitive for a season or less.
The thing I’m still not clear on, though, is this:
Is Schmidt’s 30 Win Shares in 2/3rds of a season
a) More Impressive
b) Less Impressive
c) or exactly as impressive
if the strike hadn’t happened and Schmidt had gone on to accrue 45 Win Shares in a full season?
You seem to be saying that the 30 WS performance is more impressive, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Or maybe you’re saying that since it WAS a full season (just one that consisted of 109 games instead of the usual complement) it was exactly as impressive, which also seems wrong to me. The correct answer, from my perspective, is that, while an impressive performance, Schmidt’s 30 Win Shares in 109 games is clearly less of an accomplishment than most MVPs, though he was on pace to compile a strong MVP year that he got deprived of having.
Are you joking? I didn’t even hint that. I said nothing that could possibly lead a reasonable person to such a conclusion.
I said what I said and nothing more. As my first sentence in my first post on the subject makes abundantly clear, I was saying no more than that there is an argument to be made that a shorter schedule should be accounted for in considering stats like Win Shares. Where that translates into it being “equally impressive” I did not really say and don’t really have a solid opinion on. MORE impressive, I didn’t even begin to imply.
I took the part about his win shares in strike-shortened years representing “a more significant contribution to his team than they appear” to mean that we should count them for MORE than their face value. Also, I think you’ve overstated a little here:
or at least contradict yourself, since his 30 Win Shares led Dawson by exactly 4, which you elsewhere note is barely a statistically significant lead, certainly not an insurmountable one. If 4 win shares were “ridiculously far ahead,” then surely having a 1 or 2 point lead would have to represent a genuine advantage, if not a ridiculous one, and neither of us thinks that to be the case.
If. Why assume it will be? I’d assume Maddux would be asking out of games (assuming this is even true) because he would be losing effectiveness. And if he’s protecting his ERA, that implies that staying in the game eill mean that the pitching isn’t at the same quality.
I don’t know. I don’t have some sort of psychic connection that tells me when Maddux will start to lose effectiveness. I assume he would know much better than me. And I see no reason to doubt him. Why would he ask to come out of he could still pitch effectively?
That’s your personal preference, sure. But it’s pretty irrelevant to an argument as to where Maddux ranks among the greats.
The two situations are not remotely similar. If you are tossing around Win Shares you must have either the Win Shares book and/or the New Historical Abstract. He says, on P. 346 of the latter (emphasis original):
You never give players credit for what they might have been-but you always
give them credit for what they were. In rating players, I give compensatory
credit for five types of gaps in playing careers:
Wartime service
Seasons missed because of racial segregation.
Seasons in which a major league star was trapped in the minor leagues by
forces beyond his control. [Me: this would be an argument in favor of say Edgar
Martinez]
Seasons missed by players born before 1856 who may have been in mid-
career before the National League was organized.
Players who were blocked from playing by league wars impacting their
contracts.
Strike seasons most certainly belong on this list, but either due to an oversight or one of his prototypical fits of pique James didn’t include strikes, and later disses Maddux’s missed starts in 94-95 as “spilled milk” (p. 855), and on this basis puts Clemens ahead (as of this date I would too, but it’s beside the point). I love what the man has done for the sport, but he has his inexplicable moments. Strike years are directly analogous to missing games/seasons due to the wars, and deserve equal treatment, if he is going to go this route (which I otherwise agree with).
If you then give credit to players who had their careers shortened by injuries-well that’s a whole other kettle of cats, and opens the door for the likes of Dwight Gooden and Bret Saberhagen. You don’t want to go there.
Any team would love a Maddux. a workhorse who is dependable, does not get hurt and wins more than he loses. He typically is plus 6 or 7 . That is a good start for a team .I wish the Tigers had one.
I think from the list it’s pretty obvious that he’s excluding reasons that the player himself could be assigned some responsibility for. I suppose you could nitpick the difference between “the player” and “the MLBPA”, but the latter is a legitimate representative of the former (except for the few scabs who made it).
Well since this thread is fairly full of seemheads and statheads and is about to go tits up besides, I’ll hijack it.
Anyone know of a comprehensive baseball stats site where fairly obscure data such as the probability a runner will score from first on a double (league-wide, throughout the years) can be had? Are such things even tracked?
In case you’re wondering, I’ve struck upon an idea for a modified slugging percentage, wherein the diamond is viewed as more of a continuum than it is in classical slugging percentage. The idea being that a double is actually more valuable than just the 2 total bases, since it scores a runner from first (nets +3 bases in that regard) a significant portion of the time and a runner on 2nd (I believe) is more than 25% more likely to score than a runner on 1st (as one would be given to conclude under the current setup.)
